Desire: A History of European Sexuality - Softcover

Anna Clark is the author of Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (1987), The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995), and Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2003). She is a professor at the University of Minnesota.

‘... the rich range of historical information that Clark weaves into her chapters, from state legislation, court records and details of available contraception or abortion techniques, to personal memoir, jokes and pornography, makes this ambitious overview of sex in Europe a highly accessible and successful endeavour.’
– Times Higher Education Supplement

'Provides a valuable overview of the history of sexuality in Europe since classical antiquity, synthesising as it does a mass of studies of specific regions and periods which have appeared during the last two decades.'
– Lesley Hall, Wellcome Library, UK

'Going where most historians would not dare, Desire collapses boundaries between national histories, focused chronologies, and narrow case studies–synthesizing, reflecting, and ultimately producing a groundbreaking intervention in the history of sexuality. It is a mark of Clark's scholarship that she integrates notoriously difficult theory into an absorbing narrative that will engage academics, undergraduates, and general readers. ... As a modern historian, it is humbling to be confronted with this kind of breadth and forced to rethink conventional assumptions about modernity, desire, and selfhood. Our students will find Desire an invaluable introduction to the field; we should take it as a challenge to think very carefully about the ways we write histories of sexuality and take that field forward.'
– Matt Houlbrook, Magdalen College, Oxford, UK, Victorian Studies

'Clark provides an overview that will [be] eminently useful as a bridge between scholarship and teaching. Her textbook distills much of the work done on the topic to create a valuable introduction to the field.' – Lisa Z. Sigel, DePaul University, USA, Journal of Social History